“People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.” ~ Noam Chomsky

There are a number of Israelis, such as Sahar Vardi and Uri Avnery, who strongly reject the occupation of Palestinian lands and the militarization of Israeli society. Although they recently lost their exemption status from military service, an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism known as the Haredi whose numbers comprise 10% of the Jewish state are also opposed to war and the violent land grabs of Israeli settlers. There are others as well, but their voices are suffocated by powerful forces which have no interest in ever finding a peaceful solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis.

“…not only does Israel now occupy 80% of the area of historic Palestine, but it – via the water company Mekarot – also takes 80% of the water resources from the 20% of the land that is left to the Palestinians…” – link

Looking back into history, one finds that the current right-wing ruling Likud party of Israel has roots in the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for “National Military Organization”), a terrorist Jewish organization which played an integral part in the establishment of Israel:

“…The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization or organization which carried out terrorist acts. In particular the Irgun was branded a terrorist organisation by Britain,the 1946 Zionist Congressand the Jewish Agency. The Irgun believed that any means necessary to establish the Jewish State of Israel, including terrorism, was justifiable.

“This Dahiya doctrine, developed at Tel Aviv University, calls for disproportionate force against civilians and civilian infrastructure to extract the maximum pain from those civilians, to make them stop the resistance–an absolute collective punishment crime against humanity.”
– link

The chart above does not have the complete death toll as of today, so a few thousand more Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis must be added to the body count. As the popular saying goes, war carried out by the state is simply terrorism with a bigger budget.

Just as America pursued a westward expansion of its territory with the ideology of manifest destiny and implemented the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which removed native people by force, if necessary, from desirable territories within state borders and herded them into less valuable land, so too is Israel pursuing a similar strategy. Palestinians have been isolated into two areas, the Gaza Strip (including East Jerusalem) and the West Bank. The Gaza Strip is sealed off on its land borders with Israel by concrete and steel walls, a double wire fence, watchtowers and checkpoints, and sensors and buffer zones. This Israel–Gaza barrier is equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and manned by armed Israeli police. To complete the land enclosure of Gaza at its southern border, a steel wall that will extend 60 feet deep into the ground is being erected by Egypt with the help of American and French money and expertise. Last year, the Egyptian military resorted to flooding Gazan smuggling tunnels with sewage. The Israeli navy controls all ingress and egress from Gaza ports, while Israeli drones and fighter jets rule the Gazan skies. The West Bank is similarly ghettoized and in the process of being walled off. Ironically, Israel has exiled the Palestinians to the very same sort of ghettos that confined and segregated the Jews for centuries in Europe and later in the Nazi-occupied countries.

…ghettoization is itself the aim, having been implemented for the past 65 years. In other words, the aim – unfolded with the advent of time -has been to concentrate the Palestinians in reserves, after most of their land had been robbed of them. And if they desert and move abroad, it’s of their own free will. A direct planning and ideological line stretches between the enclaves in which the Palestinian citizens of Israel live and those of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This is the real Israeli historical compromise. It is not with the Palestinians, but with the dictates of reality and among the various Zionist ideological currents. The crowded, offensive reservations – the creation of which is violence, pure and simple – are a compromise between the craving to eject the Palestinians from their land and the recognition that regional and international conditions do not permit it.
~ Amira Hass, Palestinian ghettos were always the plan

The Israeli navy uses different tactics of torture to punish the fishermen for persistently fishing, including shooting with live ammunition (on numerous occasions injuring fishermen), shelling, shooting with high-powered water cannons [all of which is simultaneously designed to damage the boats and equipment], at gunpoint forcing fishermen to strip naked and (after a long wait in the cold air) to jump into freezing waters and swim over 50m to the waiting naval ship before hauling the fishermen up, blindfolding and handcuffing them, and abducting them to Israel for interrogation unrelated to issues of fishing. – link

Due primarily to the blockade and previous Israeli airstrikes on power plant infrastructure, electricity generation has in recent years been severely curtailed to less than half of normal demand in Gaza. Loss of energy to waste treatment plants has caused “up to 90 million liters of partially treated sewage to discharge into the Mediterranean Sea every day.” The current Israeli bombardments on July 29, 2014 have now left Gaza in an even more dire condition:

“If there were one attack that could be predicted to endanger the health and well-being of the greatest number of people in Gaza, hitting the territory’s sole electricity plant would be it,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Deliberately attacking the power plant would be a war crime.” – link

“Israel’s demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a ‘strategic asset,’ as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be ‘the guardians of the Gulf,’ and after the fall of the Shah, Israel’s perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel’s militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.

The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.” ~ Noam Chomsky

Last month, Robert Fisk wrote that the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict is about land and Nafeez Ahmed wrote that it is about Gaza’s gas reserves. I say it’s about land and resources, but it’s also about war profiteers feeding the military industrial complex with endless conflict. From the gas chambers of the Holocaust to today’s slow and systematic genocide of the Palestinian people, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man and the vicious cycle of history repeating itself.

‘Operation Pillar of Defense’
The second large scale operation in Gaza
Was launched in November 2012
And Israel’s weapons sales that year
Set a new all time record
Of 7,000, 000,000 dollars,
While 169 Palestinians lay dead.

In ‘Operation Protective Edge’
Over a thousand would die in July 2014,
And whatever its final body count
The price will have been considered worth it
By the thriving Israeli arms business.

As Israel ruthlessly destroys the besieged Gaza Strip,
Elbit Systems, its largest developer of military technology
And its drone-maker, benefits from the bloodshed.

Since 8 July, 2014, when Israel began its latest offensive,
US-traded shares of Elbit Systems,
Climbed 6.1 percent
According to Bloomberg Business Week.

Israel’s three-week long massacre
Of 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza,
Including nearly 300 children,
“Has pushed Elbit’s stock close to the highest level since 2010
While its valuation on a price-to-earnings basis
Is near the most expensive in five years.”

Israel, in other words,
Makes bloodshed its business.

…

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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110 thoughts on “A Slow and Systematic Genocide”

The term ‘genocide’ gets thrown around rather too loosely. ‘Crimes against humanity’? Which country has not committed them? Those of us who have been indoctrinated into believing that civilization is an absolute are bound to suffer boundless pain as we observe the circus. The best we can do is apply pressure, yet one-sided pressure is unfair and hypocritical.

“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” – David Ben-Gurion, a.k.a. David Grün (1886-1973), Israeli Prime Minister (1948-53, 1955-63) revered by Israelis as “Father of the Nation”. The Israeli “state” has abrogated its right to exist.

It’s a fact that the creation of Israel has its roots in Jewish terrorism which continues today, but they have become freedom fighters in the eyes of most. As I said, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. The Palestinians of today are the American Indian of yesteryear.

I don’t think Palestine nor Israel have any long-term future. Their skirmishing is irrelevant to the final outcome. Land and territory is no solution. If I were Palestinian and my children were killed by Israeli’s, I would use stones to seek revenge if that’s all that was available or I would patiently assemble the components of a much more damaging weapon. I would seek their complete annihilation. That’s the way it works, there is no forgiving the murderer of your children. As soon as Putin is weakened, Syria is immobilized and Gaza is reduced to rubble, the great offensive in Iran should begin. Why? Because too many Muslims have been turned into fanatics by the Israelis and United States. The thing they want to do most before their own end and the world’s end is to see an atomized Tel Aviv lifted into the stratosphere. There’s not going to be any reconciliation in the future as chaos sets in and doom becomes apparent. Israel will take out Iran as soon as all of Iran’s allies have been disabled and they’d better do it before the dollar is dethroned and climate change induces even greater desperation.

If I were a Palestinian with resources, I would get out, Canada, South America, United States, anywhere. There isn’t much future in those places but the fuse is especially short in the Middle East.

Seems to be a pretty prescient study except they overlooked the numerous positive feedback loops. What do those at the reins of power do? They incite warfare in the Northern Hemisphere and buy isolated islands or plantations in South America or New Zealand. Thanks guys. Time to go put on my optimism bias and have a dopamine shake.

Dopamine shake- lol. I was born without much of an optimism bias which I think is probably why I used to drink about 18 Molson dopamine shakes a day for almost 20 years. I now get my dopamine from the internet doom and ice cream. Survival of the fittest and all that.

“That’s the way it works, there is no forgiving the murderer of your children.”

Seamus Heaney borrowed Wilfred Owen’s phrase, “the eternal reciprocity of tears,” to describe exactly this phenomenon in relation to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Those words echo through my mind a lot these days.

Should we be surprised? Population overshoot, water shortages, energy shortages, food shortages and drought added to the rest makes it inevitable for this region to be where the opening rounds start. Sooner or later it will happen in N America too.

The next logical step is pre-employment payday loans; you get a loan based on your child’s future earnings. This leads naturally to the prenatal payday loan….just to get ya thru until the economy recovers.

The Palestinians are the ‘niggers’ of the world – invisible, persona non grata, disposable, out of sight and out of mind – living in a powder keg of unfathomable anger and desperation, a breeding ground for suicide bombers and martyrs.

“The fear of the other is stoked by racist leaders such as Netanyahu to create a permanent instability. This instability is exploited by a corrupt power elite that is also seeking the destruction of democratic civil society for all citizens—the goal of the Israeli government (as well as the goal of a U.S. government intent on stripping its own citizens of rights). Max Blumenthal in his book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” does a masterful job of capturing and dissecting this frightening devolution within Israel.” ~ Chris Hedges

As the war in Gaza enters its second month, quelled for the moment by another 72-hour cease-fire, the question arises: Why hasn’t the International Criminal Court initiated a formal inquiry into the carnage?

To answer the question, I spent part of last week corresponding and speaking with representatives of the court, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, which consists of some 2,500 groups drawn from 150 countries whose mission is to strengthen international cooperation with the ICC and whose steering committee includes a who’s who of prominent human rights groups, including both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. I’ve also spent a good deal of time studying the Rome Statute, the name given to the ICC’s founding and governing charter.

On the basis of those efforts, I’ve concluded that there are three fundamental factors holding back the ICC. Starting with the most obvious and moving to what may be for some the most controversial or surprising, they are:

1. Neither Israel Nor the United States Wants an ICC Probe

Officially, both nations have long argued that ICC involvement in a war crimes probe would compromise peace negotiations, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just last week appealed to the U.S. to block any effort to bring the current Gaza conflict before the ICC.

Unofficially—and I would strongly suggest, in reality—both the U.S. and the Israeli leadership fear that an ICC proceeding would expose Israeli war crimes as well as highlight the U.S. role in aiding and abetting such crimes. A report issued Aug. 9 by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs lists the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s Operation Protective Edge as 1,935, including at least 1,408 civilians, of whom 452 are children and 235 are women. The report also asserts that 36,700 homes in Gaza have sustained light or serious damage, and that 225,000 residents have sought refuge in U.N. and government shelters.

Readers of Truthdig, especially those who follow the popular columns of Chris Hedges, are well familiar with the allegations against Israel and the U.S. Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, has prepared a thorough summary republished by Truthdig detailing the potential legal charges that could be brought against the two countries before the ICC. The charge sheet includes allegations of war crimes, disproportionate use of force via the IDF’s Dahiya Doctrine, genocide, apartheid practices stemming from the Gaza blockade and the indefinite detention of Palestinian militants in Israeli custody.

In 2012, the U.S. used its clout in the U.N. Security Council to head off a vote on a resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly urging the council to refer the last Gaza war to the ICC. If it becomes necessary, the Obama administration will surely block any similar request regarding the current fighting. Neither the U.S. nor Israel accepts ICC jurisdiction.

2. The Structure of the ICC Militates Against Swift Action

As I noted in my last column, the ICC was founded after a 1998 conference attended by 160 nations in Rome. The court sits at The Hague, Netherlands.

The Rome Statute produced by the conference took effect in July 2002, establishing the ICC as the first treaty-based international criminal court for the purpose of investigating and trying individuals—both governmental and non-state actors—accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute and other sources of international law. The Rome Statute authorizes the court to impose heavy jail sentences, up to life imprisonment, on those convicted. Currently, 122 nations are parties to the Rome Statute, acceding to the court’s jurisdiction.

Membership in the tribunal and cooperation with the enforcement of its judgments are voluntary as the court has no police or arrest powers of its own. Lacking compulsory jurisdiction throughout the globe, the court has acted slowly since its inception. To date, it has issued a total of 32 arrest warrants or summonses for people to appear before it. Only six of those for whom warrants have been issued have actually been apprehended, while a seventh person has voluntarily surrendered to court authorities.

Cases come before the court through three possible avenues: U.N. Security Council referrals, referrals by states that are parties to the Rome Statute, and by way of requests or complaints filed by or on behalf of non-member states that have agreed in writing to accept the court’s jurisdiction concerning a particular dispute on an ad hoc basis.

Once a referral or complaint is received, it is transmitted to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor, which after screening the submitted material, may initiate a preliminary examination of the purported crimes. There is no time limit governing the duration of a preliminary examination, which in addition to the review of documentary evidence may also involve the taking of sworn testimony before judges of the ICC.

If the ICC prosecutor concludes after completion of a preliminary examination that further court intervention is warranted, a formal investigation leading to a possible trial may be initiated. The court is currently conducting eight investigations, all involving African countries. In its history, it has held a total of four trials.

The court’s current chief prosecutor is Fatou Bensouda, a former attorney general of Gambia, a nation that is itself beset by a recent history of human rights abuses. Bensouda nonetheless is highly regarded in the human rights community. Among other announced goals, she has promised to toughen the ICC’s investigation of gender- and sex-based war crimes.

Bensouda met with Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki on Aug. 5 to discuss the Gaza war. After the meeting, her office released a statement reiterating a position the court had previously announced—namely that the ICC would have no jurisdiction over allegations of Gaza war crimes unless Palestine either formally acceded to the Rome Statute by filing appropriate ratification documents with the General Assembly or it accepted the court’s authority over the present conflict by filing a new ad hoc declaration directly with the court. A 2009 Palestinian ad hoc declaration was rejected because Palestine was not yet recognized as a state. A U.N. resolution adopted Nov. 29, 2012, however, conferred non-member observer state status on Palestine.

An ICC spokesperson confirmed in an email sent to me this week that the court had nothing to add to its Aug. 5 press release, meaning that the onus of moving forward with an ICC probe remained squarely with the Palestinian side.

3. The Palestinians May Not Want an ICC Probe as They Too Have Unclean Hands

Although none of my sources would speculate as to why the Palestinians have not taken what should be an easy step to accept ICC jurisdiction, William R. Pace, the longtime convenor of the Coalition for the ICC, reminded me in a phone interview that if the court takes up the Gaza issue, it would have to examine allegations of war crimes committed not only by Israel but by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad as well.

Apart from his fear of losing American aid should he apply for ICC membership, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lacks the backing of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad for such an undertaking as acceptance of ICC jurisdiction would render leaders of both militant groups open to war crime prosecutions of their own for such actions as:

Launching thousands of missiles aimed at the civilian population of Israel since the outbreak of open warfare. Even if the Hamas arsenal is far less deadly and technically sophisticated than the missiles fired by Israel, the definition of war crimes under the Rome Statute applies equally to attempts to harm civilian populations as to strikes that hit their targets.

Imbedding rockets and other heavy weaponry in the civilian infrastructure of Gaza. Once an issue of some controversy, the matter is no longer in serious doubt as a result of footage released by India’s NDTV that shows militants firing a rocket from an empty lot next to the very hotel where the NDTV personnel were stationed. The IDF also says it has discovered Hamas training manuals that instruct militants in the concealment of weapons and the practice of using civilians as human shields.

Summarily executing Gazans suspected of collaborating with the enemy. As reported by Reuters, Hamas has confirmed—and bragged about—the execution of several suspected “spies” since the war began, continuing a prior practice of barbaric street-corner justice condemned by Human Rights Watch in 2013. Such executions, if real, are a clear violation of the Rome Statute, which guarantees both prisoners of war and civilians fair and regular trials. Ironically, the most recent victim of Hamas-style retribution may well be the organization’s former spokesman, Ayman Taha, who died earlier this month after being shot in the head and chest allegedly for maintaining unauthorized contacts with Egyptian intelligence services.

As both the Israelis and the Palestinians understand, an ICC war crimes probe would concern not only the physical acts of war, but the intent behind the acts. For the Israelis, this entails a risk of having the hyper-nationalistic ideology of its dominant right-wing leadership—and the dehumanization of the Palestinian people that goes along with it—exposed to the world. Under the brunt of that ideology, Israel’s once vibrant antiwar movement has been intimidated and driven to virtual silence.

For Hamas, an ICC investigation would place the group’s virulently anti-Semitic 1988 charter front and center. For all its slick advances in the mastery of modern public relations, Hamas has never repudiated the charter, which calls for the killing of Jews everywhere. Indeed, in an Aug. 6 CNN broadcast, veteran anchor Wolf Blitzer confronted the current Hamas spokesman, Osama Hamdan, with the fact that he had recently uttered one of the most pernicious ancient libels against the Jews on Lebanese television—that the Jews “used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos.”

With such crude and vicious sentiments pervading the narratives of both sides to the conflict, an effective intervention by the ICC becomes less likely by the day even as it remains as vitally necessary as ever.

…On the same day, Hamas launched three powerful Iranian-designed rockets from Gaza at Israel’s Dimona reactor. Luckily, two missed the target, and Israel managed to intercept the third. But the episode represented a serious escalation of hostilities and served as an important reminder of the vulnerability of nuclear reactors in warzones.
In fact, Hamas made similar attempts to attack the Dimona complex in 2012, as did Iraq in 1991, with the aim of releasing the site’s contents to inflict radiological damage on Israel’s population. (The perpetrators appeared clueless to the fact that certain weather conditions would have concentrated the radioactive debris in the Palestinian-majority West Bank.)…

At the beginning of July, Palestine (as a UN observer state) became eligible to lodge a complaint with the International Criminal Court regarding Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have now done so. People can sign a petition supporting Palestine’s complaint to the ICC here: http://icc4israel.wesign.it/en

It’s high time for Netanyahu and other war criminals to stand in the dock in the Hague, just like Serbian and African war crimianls.

Genocide in Gaza: Viable Palestinian strategic options in the face of Israeli tactics

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are watching a horde of Indian braves bear down on them in full battle fury. “Looks like we’re in trouble, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger to his pal. “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?” Tonto responds.

The situation in Palestine mirrors very closely the problems faced by Native American Indians from early American settlers. The American settlers came up against, and ultimately annihilated the Native American Indian populations. Of the estimated 15 million Native Americans, nearly all of them were wiped out. According to some estimates, only a few million people in the U.S. today can claim significant heritage from Native American Indians. Those that were not murdered we’re simply ‘bred’ out of existence, either by rape or intermarrying with ‘white men’.

It’s important to note that the eradication of the Native Americans took a very long time, with many successive ‘invasions’ and land ‘confiscations’, as well as small wars and rebellions. The specific history of this conflict is well-known, and where it is not, the reader is invited to review extant information on the topic. The comparison between early American settlers and Israeli settlers is striking and disturbing.
[there’s a little more]

(1) The prime aim for a human being should be to help create a world of love, truth, and beauty for all living beings. Any aim opposed to the prime aim should be discarded, or combated.

(2) It is our human duty to fulfill the prime aim. No higher being or reality can do this without our active cooperation. We cannot wait for help from beyond, but must initiate work towards the prime aim immediately ourselves.

(3) Whatever opposes the prime aim is evil, whatever helps realize the prime aim is good. The struggle between these two forces is the meaning and purpose of life in the Universe. To fail to realize the good inevitably leads to destruction and death.

(4) For an individual, to work on the side of the Good is to be successful and to die fulfilled.

(5) To serve the good-true-loving-beautiful is the true vocation of human beings. There is no higher calling.

Gaza Crisis: Israel Outflanks the White House on Strategy

White House Now Scrutinizing Israeli Requests for Ammunition

By ADAM ENTOUS
Updated Aug. 13, 2014 9:50 p.m. ET

JERUSALEM—White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.

Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.

The munitions surprise and previously unreported U.S. response added to a string of slights and arguments that have bubbled behind the scenes during the Gaza conflict, according to events related by senior American, Palestinian and Israeli officials involved.

In addition, current and former American officials say, U.S.-Israel ties have been hurt by leaks that they believe were meant to undercut the administration’s standing by mischaracterizing its position and delay a cease-fire. The battles have driven U.S.-Israeli relations to the lowest point since President Barack Obama took office.

Now, as Egyptian officials shuttle between representatives of Israel and Hamas seeking a long-term deal to end the fighting, U.S. officials are bystanders instead of in their historic role as mediators. The White House finds itself largely on the outside looking in.

U.S. officials said Mr. Obama had a particularly combative phone call on Wednesday with Mr. Netanyahu, who they say has pushed the administration aside but wants it to provide Israel with security assurances in exchange for signing onto a long-term deal.

As a 72-hour pause in the fighting expired at midnight Wednesday, a senior Hamas official said negotiators agreed to another cease-fire, this one of five days. There was no immediate confirmation from Israel or Egypt.

The frayed relations raise questions about whether Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu can effectively work together. Relations between them have long been strained over other issues, including Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran and U.S.-backed peace talks with the Palestinians.

***Today, many administration officials say the Gaza conflict—the third between Israel and Hamas in under six years—has persuaded them that Mr. Netanyahu and his national security team are both reckless and untrustworthy.***

***Israeli officials, in turn, describe the Obama administration as weak and naive, and are doing as much as they can to bypass the White House in favor of allies in Congress and elsewhere in the administration.***

***While Israeli officials have privately told their U.S. counterparts the poor state of relations isn’t in Israel’s interest long term, they also said they believed Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t too worried about the tensions. The reason is that he can rely on the firmness of Israeli support in Congress, even if he doesn’t have the White House’s full approval for his policies. The prime minister thinks he can simply wait out the current administration, they say.***

“The allegations are unfounded,” said Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. “Israel deeply appreciates the support we have received during the recent conflict in Gaza from both the Obama administration and the Congress for Israel’s right to defend itself and for increased funding of Iron Dome.”

A senior Obama administration official said the White House didn’t intend to get into a “tit for tat” with the Israelis when the war broke out in Gaza. “We have many, many friends around the world. The United States is their strongest friend,” the official said. “The notion that they are playing the United States, or that they’re manipulating us publicly, completely miscalculates their place in the world.”

American officials say they believe they have been able to exert at least some influence over Mr. Netanyahu during the Gaza conflict. But they admit their influence has been weakened as he has used his sway in Washington, from the Pentagon and Congress to lobby groups, to defuse U.S. diplomatic pressure on his government over the past month.

Tensions really started to flare after Israel launched Gaza ground operations July 17 and the civilian death toll started to rise sharply, prompting U.S. officials to complain that Israel wasn’t showing enough restraint. Israeli officials rejected that notion, saying Hamas was using civilians as human shields.

U.S. officials say Mr. Netanyahu told them he was interested in a cease-fire from the start, but the two sides clashed over the process of achieving one and the players who would take part.

Bracing for a longer military campaign than expected, Israel approached the Defense Department within days of the start of the ground fighting to request money for more interceptors for the Iron Dome, which shoots down rockets aimed at population centers.

After consulting with the White House, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told aides to submit a proposal to Congress for $225 million.

Within the administration, the request was deemed noncontroversial because the Iron Dome was defensive and couldn’t be used in Gaza ground fighting, U.S. officials said.

In meetings at the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, Israeli officials told the Americans Israel had enough Iron Dome interceptors for the current Gaza operation, but wanted to replenish its stocks, according to U.S. officials who attended. So with Israel’s consent, the administration didn’t seek immediate emergency funding, Pentagon officials said, adding that they expected Congress to approve the request sometime in the fall.

***Unknown to many policy makers, Israel was moving on separate tracks to replenish supplies of lethal munitions being used in Gaza and to expedite approval of the Iron Dome funds on Capitol Hill.***

***On July 20, Israel’s defense ministry asked the U.S. military for a range of munitions, including 120-mm mortar shells and 40-mm illuminating rounds, which were already kept stored at a pre-positioned weapons stockpile in Israel.***

***The request was approved through military channels three days later but not made public. Under the terms of the deal, the Israelis used U.S. financing to pay for $3 million in tank rounds. No presidential approval or signoff by the secretary of state was required or sought, according to officials.***

A U.S. defense official said the standard review process was properly followed.

While the military-to-military relationship between Israel and the U.S. was operating normally, ties on the diplomatic front were imploding. For the Americans, they worsened dramatically on July 25, when aides to Secretary of State John Kerry sent a draft of a confidential cease-fire paper to Mr. Netanyahu’s advisers for feedback.

The Americans wanted the Israelis to propose changes. The U.S. didn’t intend or expect the draft paper to be presented to the Israeli cabinet, but that was what Mr. Netanyahu did. U.S. officials say Mr. Netanyahu’s office breached protocol by sending back no comments and presenting the paper to the cabinet for a vote.

The paper was also leaked to the Israeli media. U.S. officials say they believe the Israeli government publicly mischaracterized Mr. Kerry’s ideas with the intent of buying more time to prosecute the fight against Hamas because Israeli officials were angry over outreach by Mr. Kerry to Qatar and Turkey.

Israel and Egypt had sought to sideline Qatar and Turkey—two countries that backed Hamas—rather than increase their influence. U.S. officials say Mr. Kerry reached out to the two because they had leverage with Hamas that would be critical to getting the group to agree to another cease-fire.

From Israel’s perspective, Mr. Kerry’s cease-fire draft reflected an approach “completely out of sync with Israel, not just on a governmental level but on a societal level,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. under Mr. Netanyahu.

“The best thing that Kerry can do is stay out… We need time to do the job, we need to inflict a painful and unequivocal blow on Hamas. Anything less would be a Hamas victory,” Mr. Oren said.

***The watershed moment came in the early morning in Gaza July 30. An Israeli shell struck a United Nations school in Jabaliya that sheltered about 3,000 people. Later that day, it was reported in the U.S. that the 120-mm and 40-mm rounds had been released to the Israeli military.***

***”We were blindsided,” one U.S. diplomat said.***

***White House and State Department officials had already become increasingly disturbed by what they saw as heavy-handed battlefield tactics that they believed risked a humanitarian catastrophe capable of harming regional stability and Israel’s interests.***

***They were especially concerned that Israel was using artillery, instead of more precision-guided munitions, in densely populated areas. The realization that munitions transfers had been made without their knowledge came as a shock.***

“There was no intent to blindside anyone. The process for this transfer was followed precisely along the lines that it should have,” another U.S. defense official said.

***Then the officials learned that, in addition to asking for tank shells and other munitions, Israel had submitted a request through military-to-military channels for a large number of Hellfire missiles, according to Israeli and American officials.***

*The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, was about to release an initial batch of the Hellfires, according to Israeli and congressional officials. It was immediately put on hold by the Pentagon, and ***top officials at the White House instructed the DSCA, the U.S. military’s European Command and other agencies to consult with policy makers at the White House and the State Department before approving any additional requests***.* [emphasis added]

*A senior Obama administration official said the weapons transfers shouldn’t have been a routine “check-the-box approval” process, given the context. The official said ***the decision to scrutinize future transfers at the highest levels amounted to “the United States saying ‘The buck stops here. Wait a second…It’s not OK anymore.’*** “* [emphasis added]

White House and State Department officials were worried about public reaction.

The Palestinians, in particular, were angry, according to U.S. diplomats.

“The U.S. is a partner in this crime,” Jibril Rajoub, a leader in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Western-backed Fatah party, said of the decision to provide arms to Israel during the conflict.

Even as tensions with the White House and the State Department were spilling over, Israeli officials worked to expedite the Iron Dome money on Capitol Hill.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said Israeli officials told lawmakers the money was urgently needed because they were running out of interceptors and couldn’t hold out for a month or more.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said Congress’s goal in approving the money quickly on Aug. 1 was to send a message to the administration to stop calling Israel out about civilian casualties.

A senior Republican congressional aide said Israeli officials told senators they wanted the money sooner rather than later. He said Israel’s main purpose in accelerating the vote in Congress to before legislators’ August recess was to provide an overwhelming “show of support” for the military operation.

*The last straw for many U.S. diplomats came on Aug. 2 when they say ***Israeli officials leaked to the media that Mr. Netanyahu had told the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, that the Obama administration was “not to ever second-guess me again” about how to deal with Hamas***.* [emphasis added]

*The White House and State Department have sought ***to regain greater control over U.S.-Israeli policy. They decided to require White House and State Department approval for even routine munitions requests by Israel,*** officials say.* [emphasis added]

*Instead of being handled as a military-to-military matter, ***each case is now subject to review—slowing the approval process and signaling to Israel that military assistance once taken for granted is now under closer scrutiny***.* [emphasis added]

A senior U.S. official said the U.S. and Israel clashed mainly because the U.S. wanted a cease-fire before Mr. Netanyahu was ready to accept one. “Now we both want one,” one of the officials said.

A top Israeli official said the rift runs deeper than that. “We’ve been there before with a lot of tension with us and Washington. What we have now, on top of that, is mistrust and a collision of different perspectives on the Middle East,” the official said. “It’s become very personal.”

Coal imports to the U.S. are rising sharply even as coal mines close throughout Central Appalachia.

A big reason: price. It costs $26 a ton to ship coal from Central Appalachia to power plants in Florida compared with $15 a ton to get coal from a mine in Colombia, according to research firm IHS Energy.

Antarctica glaciers melting because of global warming may push up sea levels faster than previously believed, potentially threatening megacities including New York and Shanghai, researchers in Germany said.

A Colorado state senator insinuated in an interview last month that water can naturally catch fire and therefore hydraulic fracturing is safe.

Sen. Randy Baumgardner, R-Cowdrey, made the statements on the daily television show—The Pray in Jesus Name Project—of Gordon Klingenschmitt, a Republican who is running for state representative in eastern El Paso County.

…The closest attention to the events in Gaza and Ukraine, however, is being paid by the Pentagon, which is up to its elbows in blood in both of these wars. The US military has the closest relations with the Israel Defense Forces, which Washington funds to the tune of $3 billion annually.

The Pentagon recently asked Congress for another $19 million—on top of $23 million already allocated—to train and equip Ukrainian National Guard units. In the midst of the “anti-terror” offensive in the east of the country, the US military last month rushed a team of specialists in “strategy and policy” to Kiev to evaluate this bloody campaign.

Both of these conflicts provide real-life laboratories for what is increasingly a top priority of the Pentagon—the preparation of US forces for urban warfare.

As far as Israel goes, this is nothing new. In 2001, the US built an Urban Warfare Training facility for the IDF in the Negev desert at the cost of $266 million. The 7.4-square-mile simulated city is used for joint training exercises involving Israeli and US special forces units, who share techniques that they have learned, respectively, in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Donetsk and Luhansk, the Pentagon is overseeing something that it views with even greater interest—a full-scale siege of a modern city and a center of the industrial working class of over a million people.

Predicting that it is “highly likely that megacities [described as metropolitan areas with populations of more than 10 million] will be the strategic key terrain in any future crisis that requires U.S. military intervention,” the report reveals that the Pentagon has conducted “case studies” and “field work” in preparation for such interventions in: Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lagos, Nigeria; Bangkok, Thailand; Mexico City, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil … and New York City.

Describing the conditions that it anticipates will require US military intervention, the report warns, “As inequality between rich and poor increases … Stagnation will coexist with unprecedented development, as slums and shanty towns rapidly expand alongside modern high-rises. This is the urban future.”

“Radical income disparity,” is further described as the foremost “driver of instability” in these far-flung urban areas.

In other words, the Pentagon brass is seeking to prepare the US military for directly counterrevolutionary interventions aimed at quelling popular revolts that it sees as the inevitable consequence of the unprecedented social inequality created by world capitalism in crisis.

The inclusion of New York City in its “case studies” serves to make explicit that these preparations are directed at revolutionary developments not only in Africa, Asia, the Middle East or Latin America, but most critically within the United States itself.

This goal of preparing the US military to suppress popular rebellion inside the US has also been pursued with a series of provocative “urban warfare training” exercises conducted in major US cities in recent years. There was also the opening earlier this year in Virginia of a US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group training center that consists of a mock American town, replete with office buildings, a church, a sports stadium, a subway stop and a train station. The Army said that the $96 million center is designed to realistically “replicate complex operational environments and develop solutions.”

The Pentagon’s preparations go hand-in-hand with the militarization of supposedly civilian police forces, which are almost universally outfitted with SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) squads armed to the teeth for modern warfare, like those deployed against St. Louis residents protesting the police murder of Michael Brown.

The slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine represents a warning to the working class in the US and all over the world. The same financial and corporate oligarchy that supports these wars is prepared to employ murderous violence to defend its system against a revolutionary challenge from the working class…

“You smell that? Do you smell that? Entropy, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of entropy in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like … high entropy.” Adapted from Robert Duvall playing Lieutenant Bill Kilgore – Apocalypse Now.

That should be Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. Alternatively Kilgore exposes his armpit and says, “Boy, smell that. You know what is? That’s testosterone. You ever smell testosterone. Only thing that smells better than testosterone in the mornin is high entropy boy, and we got lots a both. Now let’s go surfin.”

What whole generations of movie goers and film critics missed was the real money line in Apocalypse Now. Everybody just loved that “it smelled like victory” piece, I guess because it had some kind of metaphorical cachet. The real important line is at the end of the rant when he says, followed by a wistful facial expression, “Someday this war’s gonna end”.

How much methane came out of that hole in Siberia?

Siberia has explosion holes in it that smell like methane, and there are newly found bubbles of methane in the Arctic Ocean. As a result, journalists are contacting me assuming that the Arctic Methane Apocalypse has begun. However, as a climate scientist I remain much more concerned about the fossil fuel industry than I am about Arctic methane. Short answer: It would take about 20,000,000 such eruptions within a few years to generate the standard Arctic Methane Apocalypse that people have been talking about.

A few years ago these big time rock star climate scientists were calling the methane warners, alarmists and doom sayers. Now they are the go to guys? They were off by at least 40 years on the arctic sea ice. They have been off on a lot of time lines. We are well past models and their diplomatic personal predictions; stick to the data and all the shit going down in real time.

I can’t complain about the summer weather here in Flagstaff – cool rains, big billowing clouds, and stunning sunsets. Yes, we are living in the twilight of the anthropogenic, but I have learned to accept that our fate is sealed. Scientists are not Gods and are not omniscient. They’re just as fallible and emotionally fucked up as the rest of the human race.

– Optimism Bias and the “Discount Rate”. The human brain is not wired to deal with long-term issues such as climate change:
As with other organisms, humans have an evolutionary predisposition to be optimistic, no matter how grave the situation may be. Optimism reduces cortisol, a stress hormone. Dopamine increases optimism bias.
In economics as well as human psychology, costs incurred in the future are not as important as costs incurred in the present.
Immediate needs supersede distant, abstract problems of the future.
This inclination to value the present over the future is described in the concept of the “discount rate”. As with optimism bias, the “discount rate” of human psychology is not a conscious motive. We are following behaviors which have historically proven successful to our species, i.e. maximizing the utility of resources and reproducing before we die.

There are many other evolved traits in humans that are major obstacles to a sustainable society, but I’ll leave it at that. Maybe I’ll write a post on this subject. Many books have been written on it.

At any rate, it pays to be aware of these things to avoid a lot of anguish and sleepless nights.

I think it’s even harder to get people to look at human psychology than climate science. Most people cannot stand the thought that humans are just a big brained ape; another animal. Scared of the truth and responsibility. Most believe in a higher power or higher purpose or both. We special, we will be around forever. Yahweh rescued, Jesus Raptured, Allah para-diced à la martyrdom, Cyber-Raptured (new model I-phone everyday for eternity in cyber heaven), Colonize Mars in the Elon Musk space ark, Reincarnation, and rescued by E.T. What does that leave? About a million people who don’t believe any of it? How bout them odds.

Hunter-gatherers picked off all of the easy to kill, high EROEI megafauna in the Pleistocene and then had the unfortunate intelligence to start eating the large deposits of rich soil, so to speak, with agriculture. Finally enough net energy to build some temples and pyramids and such. Growth, drought, collapse, growth, warfare, religion, recording of information, and so on. Eventually, especially with the advent of recorded knowledge, the vicious circle principle (VCP) takes hold and with each increase of net energy the robustness of our ability to create tools to entrain even more energy is magnified. We continue copulating like rabbits with a little infanticide and some tribal warfare thrown in but this hardly slows us down. As we continue to eat the soils, we also gorge on fossil fuels (big, easy deposits first, then the little ones)
which can be applied to enhancing our ability to eat the soils and overfish. Before you know it, it’s high entropy all over the place and we’re about to be put six feet under a blanket of CO2 and methane with a little radioactive holy water sprinkled on top to seal the deal. Meanwhile the apey-ego boys are starting wars, flying around in toy jets and cruising the seas in 500 ft. yachts while trying to gobble-up as much territory as possible before their competitors get it, leaving the average Joe Blow sitting on the dock of the bay. (Just a short summary of ideas elicited by reading some of Craig Dilworth’s book, “Too Smart for Our Own Good…..”.

Thanks. He stopped short of showing his audience the bottom of the chasm with all of the corpses strewn about. I would slightly amend his Vicious Circle Principle in that greed creates much of the consumer need so that profits can be generated. In the end we will wonder why we wasted so many resources on toys and trifles and the answer is – to make profit as quickly as possible, use up all resources so that we can derive a ten percent profit. Then what? A small global elite owns ten percent of the original resource base and everyone else inherits a depleted wasteland. Society has become a mechanism for a small group of manipulators to acquire mega-territory while others sink into the mire of high entropy waste. I would guess that most well-healed will buy huge game reserves in South American or New Zealand and exclude other desperate humans from encroaching on their territory. Population will be forced lower by simply ring-fencing massive resource tracts, especially as further investment in a failing society becomes a black hole with negative returns. Eventually large quantities of paper assets will be shifted into the real economy, raising the price of all things catastrophically and also extinguishing many overlapping claims to the same collateral. Resources will be hoarded and the game of turning assets into waste will end. Jobs will disappear and a lot of people will try to eke out an existence somewhere on what little public commons exist. “No jobs, keep going”, will be on every billboard in the country and Ferguson, MO will be repeated a thousand times over, except the Wal-Mart and SpeedyMart won’t be around for the desperate looting public.

I think it will be medieval. Lots of smaller fiefdoms with military strong men in charge; the new elite. Once the illusion of those currently in charge is exposed, the testosterone fueled, violent young men who do the dirty work will follow someone they respect and fear and who allows rape and plunder. One of their own. It will be similar to the end of the Roman republic. Once the system and infrastructure starts failing it will be very difficult to control large areas of territory and the plebs. Takes an awful lot of skilled people to keep industrial society running. I also think many people will fight back with assassination, sabotage and guerrilla warfare. How many Americans have been trained by Uncle Sam to blow shit up? How many have the blue prints to make their own fertilizer bombs and such? How many hackers are there that can cause all sorts of mayhem and destruction with a computer? Once they start causing the suffering and death of these peoples family and friends, they radicalize them. Add in that everyday more folks realize there will be no future and the secular jihad begins. Or we could have nuclear war and winter next week or a big methane belch, temperature spike and no more crops. Variety- it’s the spice of life.

‘Operation Pillar of Defense’
The second large scale operation in Gaza
Was launched in November 2012
And Israel’s weapons sales that year
Set a new all time record
Of 7,000, 000,000 dollars,
While 169 Palestinians lay dead.

In ‘Operation Protective Edge’
Over a thousand would die in July 2014,
And whatever its final body count
The price will have been considered worth it
By the thriving Israeli arms business.

As Israel ruthlessly destroys the besieged Gaza Strip,
Elbit Systems, its largest developer of military technology
And its drone-maker, benefits from the bloodshed.

Since 8 July, 2014, when Israel began its latest offensive,
US-traded shares of Elbit Systems,
Climbed 6.1 percent
According to Bloomberg Business Week.

Israel’s three-week long massacre
Of 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza,
Including nearly 300 children,
“Has pushed Elbit’s stock close to the highest level since 2010
While its valuation on a price-to-earnings basis
Is near the most expensive in five years.”

Israel, in other words,
Makes bloodshed its business.

An Israeli arms manufacturer’s pitch
Would fit neatly onto a matchbox:
“Look, what is Gaza? I tell you what it is.
It’s an asset. Why’s it an asset?
Because Gaza is the very epicentre
Of global instability, but guess what?

We’ve got it totally under control.
So, here’s what we can do for you
We can sell you the hardware
And we can sell you the software
And the follow-up and the accessories
And the bells and the whistles,
So that you and your government can control
Any similar situation. You’ll be safe,
And your security forces will be safe.
How come? Because we’ve tried it for you in Gaza.
And, you gotta believe it, it works.
We have five thousand five hundred insurgents
Locked up in our dungeons at any one time.
You’re talking to those with the know-how.”

Given the ever-increasing disparity
Between the rich and the poor,
Governments are now becoming more fearful
Of their disaffected populations:
Those who can see how they’re being exploited,
By those with hundreds of times their wealth,
By those who have many more opportunities,
By those who live longer and eat better food,
By those whose children are given a head start,
And, understandably, disaffected populations
Judge the prevailing situation to be unfair.

Greater numbers of people are becoming resentful
Of being ruled by those in positions of privilege,
And so economically unbalanced states
Are keen to know how to suppress the under-privileged
And how best to neuter their righteous aspirations.

In July 2014 Israel tells Palestinian families to flee
So it can bomb their homes more freely:
And then it bombs the places
Which they’ve run to for shelter;
By so doing, it undermines their will to live,
Deliberately and systematically
And such techniques are strategically useful.

Gaza’s power plant is routinely destroyed,
And Israel starves Gaza through its siege
Callously counting the minimum calories people need
for bare survival and supplying Gaza’s inhabitants
with no more, no less. Pushing its food through the bars.

This is called the Dahiya doctrine; devised by Israeli generals
in 2006 – putting them on a diet was thought of as a way
“to force hostile populations back into the Stone Age:
Keeping them preoccupied with the essentials of life
Rather than demanding, or fighting, for their rights.” [19]

Thanks for the sobering – if disgusting – look into the dark side of human possibility being manifested in Israel. I got almost halfway through the illustrated version before turning away. Ironically I had just finished some notes on love before checking your site this morning. I put that below in case anyone might need something less lacerating to start their day….

What Is Love?

Love is not a thing. Love is an inner process, direction, flavor, mystery. It defies definition and is best approached with openness and a questioning, sensitive mind. Love is deep and broad, and can be approached from innumerable angles and circumstances. Love exists as an infinite ocean, a universal field permeating and transcending everything, arising and fading away constantly into an infinite unknown beingness. Love is that which confers the highest meaning and purpose on universal existence. Love is the raison d’etre of life in the universe, the basis and the goal of the whole cosmic affair.

Without Love, the universe is a dead and meaningless thing. Love bestows the magical kiss that brings everything alive and moving towards growing levels of fulfillment and happiness. Is love real? Any idea of reality which excludes love is a deadly illusion which will kill all possibility of the richness life is capable of manifesting. To deny love is to destroy life.

UPDATE: 225 Jewish Survivors and Descendents of Survivors of Nazi Genocide Condemn the Massacre of Palestinians

225 Jewish survivors and descendents of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide have signed on to this letter condemning Israel’s massacre on Gaza and calling for an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people. In the letter, they also speak out against the abuse of their histories to promote the dehumanization of Palestinians advanced by Elie Wiesel among others in his recent ads placed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Guardian. If you are a survivor of the genocide or a descendent of survivors, please click here and scroll to the bottom to add your name to the letter. Please donate to help us place this letter with its signatories as an advertisement in the New York Times in order to convey the message that never again means NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a scale of “madness” along which we all sit. Incorporating the latest advances in brain scanning and neuroscience, Dutton demonstrates that the brilliant neurosurgeon who lacks empathy has more in common with a Ted Bundy who kills for pleasure than we may wish to admit, and that a mugger in a dimly lit parking lot may well, in fact, have the same nerveless poise as a titan of industry.

Dutton argues that there are indeed “functional psychopaths” among us—different from their murderous counterparts—who use their detached, unflinching, and charismatic personalities to succeed in mainstream society, and that shockingly, in some fields, the more “psychopathic” people are, the more likely they are to succeed. Dutton deconstructs this often misunderstood diagnosis through bold on-the-ground reporting and original scientific research as he mingles with the criminally insane in a high-security ward, shares a drink with one of the world’s most successful con artists, and undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation to discover firsthand exactly how it feels to see through the eyes of a psychopath.

As Dutton develops his theory that we all possess psychopathic tendencies, he puts forward the argument that society as a whole is more psychopathic than ever: after all, psychopaths tend to be fearless, confident, charming, ruthless, and focused—qualities that are tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century. Provocative at every turn, The Wisdom of Psychopaths is a riveting adventure that reveals that it’s our much-maligned dark side that often conceals the trump cards of success.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths – by Kevin Dutton – unabridged Audiobook – All parts in one

Mimi, a Jewish anti-war activist using a pseudonym, echoed Sappir’s sentiments: “People like to say that Israeli society is half right-wing and half left-wing, but this is not true. The center is extremely right-wing.”..,

…Inbal Sinai, a Jaffa-based Jewish Israeli anti-war activist, recounted harassment by police sympathetic to the right wing. Sinai told VICE News about an interrogation for charges that she is not allowed to discuss, as the investigation is ongoing. “I asked the police officer why they don’t deal with racist and criminal problems in Jaffa. The police officer said to me, ‘When it’s right-wing people that control the state doing stuff, we look aside, and when it’s leftist people like you who are against the state, we will hunt you down.'”

Sinai added: “I told the head of investigation about this and he said that he didn’t know about it, even though everything in the investigation room is recorded. They harassed me, telling me, ‘You are a whore and you like Arab dick.’ It’s not the first time.”

…Racist ideology and its virulent expression both from high office and the “Jewish Street” are wide-spread and open. Degrading Palestinians, while claiming to be a superior race above the laws of the rest of the world, serves to justify all crimes against the people of Gaza. Near and far, this expression of “collective Jewish identity and solidarity”, based on ethnic-religious superiority always threatened by hostile, inferior ‘native’ people, accounts for the unflinching support by top Hollywood moguls, Ivy League professors, French intellectuals, British peers and prominent investment Wall Street bankers.

Ideological affinities and ethno-religious loyalties aside, many Israeli Jews also have a major, material stake in robbing and expelling the people of Palestine: Seized Palestinian lands result in new cheap subsidized housing, swimming pools for Jews only, developments on lands where olive groves once flourished and extended families had lived and died. Middle and working class Jews obtain free housing; real estate speculators seize choice ocean front properties for luxury condos and tourist destinations. Building contractors secure lucrative construction contracts from the state. Pillage forms an important material basis for Israel’s high standard of living, many times higher than that of Palestinians, much higher that that of Israel’s non-Jewish population and higher even than the Americans who have been forced to subsidize the ‘Jewish State’ for almost 50 years.

Equally important, Israel’s assault on Gaza serves as a testing ground for its weapons of mass destruction and its anti-missile Dome. In this regard, the slaughter in Gaza serves as a dress rehearsal (and a graphic warning) for new wars across the region in association with the US and its clients. NSA analyst Edward Snowden’s latest documents reveal that Israel works in tandem with the US throughout North Africa, the Middle East, The Persian Gulf, South Asia and Islamic countries in choosing targets and making war plans…

“Of course the people don’t want war. … But … it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. … All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.”
~ convicted Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring

The average person in a population cannot be disabused of their simple religious and secular group-think for a couple of reasons: 1) the limbic system rewards the adoption of simple ideologies and religions that afford future reward for unwavering belief and 2) the accomplishment of reasoning, the building of an alternative model based upon principles of science is not a rewarding path for most humans, especially where more seductive, and easily obtained options are present.

A Westerner can study science and technology in ever decreasing concentric rings of focus and by this specialization never find a need to displace religious belief established at a young age. The miraculous explanation holds sway even as they participate metabolically in a system whose origins and developmental course eludes their perception and even fails to rouse their curiosity. Even brief glimpses of the panorama of reality afforded by a wide ranging education are denied by innate optimism bias or filed away lest they interfere with “normal” social engagement.

So it seems that education and the natural neurological reward system of humans, existing primarily to equip students to function within the metabolic machinery of technological civilization, is inadequate to create a necessary and voluntary negative feedback to amend the current suicidal trajectory of mankind.

As civilization begins to fail for various reasons, we should expect a reinforcement of tribal identity, increased contrast being drawn between various ethnic and religious groups and demonizing which will advance the subliminal goal of eliminating competition for increasingly scarce resources. At the same time, fidelity and faith in the national-religious entity will be reinforced to strengthen efforts at external expansion and to protect from belligerent foes with similar designs.

It is plain to see that even with the lesser potency of conventional weapons, essential infrastructure can be turned to rubble in very short periods of time and unfortunately, at this energy limited and climate challenged period we enter, and which we will likely never exit, most infrastructure will not be repaired or rebuilt. Even those nations not directly involved in war will see their soon to be superfluous structures slowly deteriorate to complete uselessness.

As mankind has invested more in its technology of war than in any other due to a natural inclination to warfare, a fast collapse seems highly likely in the future as large scale military engagements become inevitable, even though this could destroy the international sourcing of key military and industrial components.

Whether we destroy ourselves in a sudden convulsion of warfare or succeed in establishing a homogeneous capitalistic malignancy that attempts to devour all remaining fossil fuels in its unalterable pursuit of growth, we can be assured that peace, unity and prosperity will be words with little use in the future lexicon of those practicing survival of the fittest.

The need, the desire for an eternal sky parent is so powerful and seductive that even the most scientifically trained brains are susceptible. I’m always amazed at a guy like, Francis Collins (geneticist and physician) who was mildly indoctrinated as a child, but was atheist by college then later came to the conclusion that god is real, after seeing a pretty waterfall. How does one square that; fascinating.

The United States is one of the most unequal and rigidly stratified societies in the industrialised world. In the wake of the Great Recession, it has become increasingly clear that success in America flows to the wealthy and the well-connected. Why do these inequities persist in the face of steady unemployment, abject poverty and rising homelessness? Why do they not meet with stronger resistance? A crucial part of the explanation has to do with our psychology: economic inequality continues largely without objection in American society in part because of basic psychological processes at work within everyday Americans.

Economic inequality is a direct affront to one of America’s most deeply entrenched systems of belief: the ‘American Dream’ and its promise of equality of opportunity. The American Dream is pervasive in political speeches and contemporary fiction and cinema, and is a core right referenced in historical government documents (i.e., the Bill of Rights). It holds that all Americans have an equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, provided they work hard. Increasing economic inequality, by contrast, may imply that opportunities at the top are closed off for everyday Americans—the rich accumulate wealth and real opportunity while the rest of us scrap over the remains.

Simultaneous belief in the American Dream on the one hand and the stifling immobility caused by rising economic inequality on the other creates what social psychologists call cognitive dissonance: a state in which two belief systems come into conflict with each other. Dissonance is painful for people, particularly from cultures (like that of the U.S.) which consider hypocrisy a vice. To avoid dissonance, people tend to evade or reject beliefs that conflict with those to which they are already strongly attached, or else to form additional beliefs that restore internal consistency between new information and their existing commitments. Given the entrenched nature of belief in the American Dream, the tension between it and observable realities of economic inequality is generally resolved in favour of the former. That is, Americans tend to downplay or justify widening inequality in order to sustain their belief in the possibility of a brighter tomorrow.

Evidence for how Americans downplay economic inequality comes from research conducted in 2011 by two social psychologists named Mike Norton (of Harvard) and Dan Ariely (of Duke University). Norton and Ariely asked participants to estimate how wealth is distributed between those at the top and bottom of society’s hierarchy, and found that Americans dramatically underestimate existing levels of economic inequality. They also found that this ignorance crosses class, ideological and demographic lines—young, old, rich, poor, liberal and conservative alike were all likely to underestimate levels of wealth inequality in society. Their conclusion was that Americans are blissfully and perhaps wilfully unaware of the economic conditions that shape their lives.

Americans also acquiesce in and condone high levels of economic inequality. A recent Gallup poll suggests that Americans are surprisingly unfazed by record disparities. Only 39% of Americans surveyed were “very dissatisfied” with the distribution of wealth in the United States—a distribution, recall, that places nearly 50% of the total income earned by Americans in the hands of just 10% of the population). Americans are just now recovering from a recession period in which housing foreclosures were rampant and unemployment levels topped 8% for more than three years. Even in these conditions only 40 in 100 people were “very dissatisfied” with distribution. This pattern of responses, although potentially caused by a host of other factors (e.g., political knowledge), is consistent with what we would expect from cognitive dissonance at work.

Those who benefit most from the status quo—the people at the top of society’s hierarchy—are especially motivated to downplay the injustice of economic inequality. Over the last several years I’ve worked in laboratories at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois that have examined the ways in which people who think of themselves as the highest ranking members of society—those with the most money, education and best jobs—perceive the causes of economic inequality. The research, spanning a dozen empirical studies, suggests that those at the top of the hierarchy are particularly likely to justify economic inequality as fair and natural.

In follow-up work conducted in 2013, Keltner and I examined American lay theories about the origins of social hierarchy. In a large online survey we found that those who ranked themselves higher in society reported a greater belief that the world is fair and that society’s structure is based on merit than did their lower-ranking counterparts. Moreover, these same high-ranking individuals tended to believe that social hierarchy was essentialist—a stable, inherent and biological feature of individuals—whereas lower-ranking individuals believed that social hierarchy was more malleable and externally determined. Together these studies suggest an alarming tendency on the part of those at the top of American society to believe that rising economic inequality is a natural product of the merits and favourable genes of the wealthy.

The tendency for high status individuals to downplay the severity of inequality extends to government officials. In the study describing this phenomenon, Bennett Callaghan of the University of Illinois and I examined the frequency with which members of the U.S. House of Representatives sponsored legislation to reduce economic inequality (e.g., sponsoring a bill to raise the minimum wage). We found that as wealth increased, members of Congress became less likely to sponsor such legislation. This pattern was particularly true of Democrats; Republican members of Congress were less likely to sponsor decreases in economic inequality regardless of their wealth.

Decades of research in the social sciences reveals that when economic inequality deepens, society suffers. Many Americans cling to the hope that as the harms of inequality mount, policies to reduce it will become more popular and harder to discredit. Unfortunately, these hopes fail to account for our basic psychology: we, and those in power in particular, cling to the status quo and, in the service of avoiding cognitive discomfort, overlook or rationalise economic inequality even as it causes some of the most significant social problems in our society. If they are to be successful movements for social change must confront not only the complex political and economic conditions that create economic inequality, but also the powerful forces of legitimation that exist within our own minds.

What we believe about how businesses succeed and how wealth is created has a powerful impact on the public-policy choices we make (including how we tax upper-income people). UFE’s new book, The Self-Made Myth: And the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals, exposes the reality that any enterprise is the result of a variety of factors, including government support: No one in this country ever “made it” alone.

A West Australian fundamentalist christian geologist has published a scientifically unsound book,’The twilight of abundance’,which claims that the Earth is now undergoing global cooling.
Maurice Newman,who is a business advisor to Australia’s prime minister and is a climate disruption denialist,is promoting the book.
With the relentless campaign of climate misinformation by the Murdoch newspapers ,the war on science from this government,and now this, it is no surprise that so many here still think that climate disruption is not occurring.
For some more info on the book,loonpond.blogspot.com.au (Thursday Aug14 post)
(I can’t post a link with this tablet)

The real reason for the recent U.S. bombing campaign in the Kurdish region:

…Obama’s motives, both said and unsaid, are strikingly similar to those behind the 2003 invasion in that each decision was made to protect the Kurds, protect U.S. interests and get rid of a threatening sectarian power…

…Erbil is also home to many major American oil wells. Big oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, among others, have important drilling operations in Kurdistan. ISIScaptured a major oil refinery in Baiji in June.A similar takeover in Erbil could hurt the U.S. economy. In 2003, Iraqi oil was also important to U.S. interests….

…Despite ISIS’ deadly campaign in Syria, there has been no significant American intervention there, in part because there is no oil…

…As Haaretz recently reported, the larger settlements of the West Bank—which have grown astronomically since the signing of the Oslo Agreement with the Palestinian Authority—are now in the midst of a housing bubble that is outstripping prices in Tel Aviv and its suburbs. Young urban professionals, with no interest in ideology or perhaps even in Zionism, flock to these well-financed and subsidized cities, where the attendant express highways spirit them quickly back and forth from Tel Aviv. Israel’s military industrial complex gives them security from the tenants of the land they’ve stolen.

As these suburbs, grow, perhaps, and as the twisted “peace process” between the compliant Palestinian Authority and Israel evolves, we may in decades to come see a Palestine—or what is left of it—not unlike the US’s black underclass cities and towns. Perhaps it may yet become a broken and discontiguous economic-ethnic series of hamlets—segregated underemployed communities of service workers kept under lock and key by a less visible series of cages and walls, no less violent than military occupation. Given the current state of negotiations, with Israel shaping a Palestinian Authority take-over of the rubble of Gaza, perhaps one tiny wall separating these two territories will be lifted, and Gaza allowed to enjoy the slightly less onerous open-air prison system of the West Bank.

Perhaps then people will also wonder what the Palestinian’s problem is. Why they can’t keep out of trouble with the authorities. Why their men line the halls of the entity’s prisons. Why they cannot simply learn to stop being racists and love their oppressor. Why they are rioting. This is, in fact, the reality that Israel is striving for in the West Bank, institutional apartheid that becomes so well-camouflaged and accepted over time that it begins to look like the US’s honed version of it—an “unfortunate” remnant of the past that is always explainable, always the victim’s fault, and is always in the midst of being fixed, with, not surprisingly, little success. Between the decimation of Gaza and the continued madcap pace of colonization in the West Bank and Jerusalem, they are closer than ever to this goal.

Which brings us to a final, and perhaps most alarming, similarity between Ferguson and Palestine. Both places nominally have a president who superficially represents them, from a similar ethnic and economic background, the product of a historic and unprecedented process. It was an event that overturned years of conventional wisdom that claimed the disenfranchised would never know representative state leaders.

The last dispiriting likeness is the betrayal of that hope–that leader who works for the very structure oppressing the people he seems to most represent, who is revealed to be only the latest trick for a white supremacist system of violence and dispossession that can superficially change, but will not budge. The leader that arms the enemy, kills for them, lies for them, and prevents racial and economic justice for his own ostensible people. For the people of Palestine, it is Abbas. For the people of Ferguson, Sanford, Oakland and other cities, this is Obama–whose bloodless and offensive commentary on the murder of Mike Brown shocked a nation of angry people perhaps as much as the FPD response did. They couldn’t seem any more different superficially, of course, but more and more, we see they have the same white supremacist, capitalist boss.

xraymike: I just had a similar thought and was going to comment how the slow, systematic genocide is now being applied here (although in our case it might be ‘culturecide’ since all Am. citizens have been in the crosshairs now since 9-11, Columbine, Sandy Hook, etc., through wage stagnation, job flight, the enormous transfer of wealth from the bottom up and all the other economic, political and other “tricks” they’re playing on us at will).

It is apparent that organized religions are ponzi schemes utilizing fear and reward to control behavior within society in such a way as to maximize resource flow to the upper levels of the organizational hierarchy. For Christians there is the fear of hell and for Sharia law Muslims there is fear of the whip or some degree of dismemberment. Cooperative behavior maximizes the effectiveness of not only production within the religious tribe but also, due to suppression of natural tendencies, creates a state of tension that can be released through warfare against trespassers of moral codes or vicious attack upon neighboring tribes. Needless to say, modern finance works in a similar manner with credit being bestowed upon the financially upright and damnation saved for those slaves who have cheated or failed to produce for the master. Those with a low credit scores are the equivalent of the sinful and morally repugnant in religious terms. The manipulation and energy flows are apparent and yet millions are fed into the system annually because they want to believe that sinless living and support of the church will reward them with heaven and hard work, paying taxes and paying interest will give them the American Dream. And yet it is not too difficult to ascertain who benefits most from these arrangements.

Religion will always thrive upon the most gullible, giving them a little dopamine in a world where poverty affords them none, while the financial masters will turn to force when it is apparent that the American Dream no longer exists, even though the taxes and interest payments persist. As these are cleverly and deliberately organized schemes it implies that their purveyors are somewhat psychopathic or perhaps believing in their own magic. None of their magic will put the CO2 and methane back into Pandora’s low entropy box. The forbidden fruit of fossil fuels is going to burn all these fools.

There were several comments made on Scribbler’s site in response to his essay here that Robert deleted/censored, among them are the three below which I see nothing wrong with. Too reality-based for the “Fantasy Scribe”? Yes, I think so. Anything that goes against his meme of a techno-utopian industrial civilization run entirely on “renewables” gets erased. Of course Robert also censored my comment on human behavior. I find his selective thinking to be very dangerous because it plays right into what people want to hear – that something short of a radical reconfiguration of our way of life will save us. Robert, where’s my check from the fossil fuel industry?

“For we have already burned enough fossil fuel to keep warming on the trajectory to hit 1.5 to 2.5 C this century and 3-5 C or somewhat more long term — a bad result, and one that would likely require extensive human deployment of atmospheric carbon capture technologies. But it is far better than the alternative.”

It took a lot of energy and lot of years to produce those long chain hydrocarbons and sequester them in relatively harmless locations. It took an ape with technology and a bit of a chill to dig them all up and burn them to create a temporary, warm, fantasy existence. Job’s about done and poof, we’re gone. Things should stay really warm for at least the next hundred thousand years. We went too far, so far that we put our existence in jeopardy, and civilization is likely toast. We’ll burn the rest of the fossil fuels trying to stay cool. I would love to be involved in “atmospheric carbon capture technology”, just what the oncologist ordered, except snake oil never cured anyone of cancer. Now, if Ebola kills 90% of the human population in a matter of a few years and the remaining population can spend their time decommissioning nuclear plants, we might……………might what? Shake hands, sign a contract, get our shovels out and start digging again?

How much money are you going to put into capturing invisible carbon from the air when you can’t afford food, your pension has just been jujitsu’d and the tide is lapping at back steps of your beachfront condo? None, nada, zip, zilch, forget it. We’re not going back to the land of milk and honey, California is already halfway to hell and the rest of us are dipping our toes in the river Styx, watching the nightmare unfold and wondering what it will be like when we finally get our just reward.

Thanks for including my comment from Scribbler in the above post. I try to be respectful, rational and clear when commenting. I took a risk posting it to that site as it’s been clear to me for a long time the discussion there is too narrow. Was saddened that it was deemed so threatening to the Scribbler.

Wouldn’t a team-up between the Scribbler and that old Batman foe from the sixties, the Eraser be an interesting pairing.

I agree that by only telling people what they want to hear is very dangerous and I don’t understand how different this is from BAU. Sadly that’s the place we’ve been at for a long time now.

In recent weeks when I raise any of the following issues, Gaza, Ferguson, CA, drought people actually recoil. They don’t want to know.

For years I’m considered a self-hating Jew by all my Jewish neighbors. It hasn’t been a picnic trying to bring up the issue of how I perceive the behavior towards the Palestinians. It doesn’t help my case when I compare current behavior to what went on in Germany. Local Synagogue is a rabid supporter of expanding those settlements. Useless to argue with this rabbi. Definitely useless to raise the specter of how Jews behaved in the USA during the thirties. It was more important to assimilate than join in along with Ben Hecht and the more aggressive stance they took regarding what was going on in Germany. I believe there is a great deal of guilt American Jews have never addressed.

Keeping a job and staying out of trouble was upper most for many (not all) as memories of the pogroms and the world they left was fresh in their minds. It wasn’t as if they were accepted in USA with open arms. That’s why the movement Ben Hecht tried to ignite in the thirties never really took off. Hollywood and Hitler is a good book to get an perception of those years in the movie industry and the country. For the moguls the bottom line was money, not issues. BAU.

It’s why someone like Smedley Butler could so easily be white washed out of history instead of being as well known as George Washington.

Two books that might be of interest to people:

1) The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work by Paul Moloney

In the early 90’s I returned to school to obtain a PhD in psychology only to realize as I undertook the course work, talked with professors and fellow students and worked on some projects that I saw some major flaws with the system. There could be benefits only I realized (as these authors have) that therapy is a huge part of our economic system. Most/many therapists become addicted to their patients and the patients payments without acknowledging this fact to the patient.

As a former 12-stepper I found that many people in the variety of programs that exist becomes a substitute for whatever thing they are addicted to. DA is probably the most offensive of the programs. Major group think regarding money and the economy. It’s like another version of the Secret. If you wish hard enough it will come to you. Any talk of reality and how things really worked is met with a huge crucifix, Star of David or garlic to keep you away from them.

It’s good to see some people address these issues and the issue of the illusion of “Green” energy being able to run what we have so we can keep BAU. Ed Begley, spokesman for the electric car always forgets to talk about how that electricity is generated.

Mind blown myself, I rode off to another part of campus to attend a panel with a title right up my alley: “False Solutions: The Flaws of Green Energy.” Two guys from something called the Fertile Ground Environmental Institute had the facts down as to how “Renewable” Energy is really reconstituted fossil fuel and, thus, more inefficient than just burning the fossil fuel for electrons in the first place. They examined the vast amounts of coal that go into making solar panels, wind towers, steel, cement, etc. They had photos of massive mines, including the huge Rare Earth metals mine in China that provides batteries/magnets for 80% of our iPhones, iPads, wind power generators, Pius batteries, etc. – the basis for this form of industrial energy. They claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have died in the forced labor (slavery) of the mines – 20% of all Tibetans alive! (Yes. I’m checking into that.)

I’ve been waiting for a solid analysis of “Renewable Energy” and this was the first time I’ve seen such a panel discussion on it at a green event. Even with massive subsidies to wind and solar, these provide fewer than 2% of overall power in the US grid and even that is unusable without base-load steam-generated power – coal, nukes, Biomass or natural gas. What really passes for “renewable” under the odious “25 x 25 renewable portfolio” plans adopted by most states is Biomass – the burning of trees for electrons. Getting those trees to the steam plants is the real underlying purpose of the many new logging plans that Oregon Wild and others now oppose.

As my buddy Jeff notes, “And since 90% of “clean energy” is the biomassacre, every time I hear someone want to deal with “climate” I hear the march of the bio-suicides: Bio-char, bio-mass, bio-fuel. Therefore, I despair every time I hear anyone talking about climate, because I see it as a symbol of the environmental movement, if there ever really was one, having lost its mind, and its way, and only being comfortable with nothing that will make any difference at all, as intended.

Right now from Michigan to Vermont to Wisconsin to California THAT is the suicide of the planet being most ramped up, and despite the lies of those pushing renewable energy, is going to double, triple, ten times more as we promote “getting off fossil fuels” to save the climate; thereby assassinating nature in the name of green.

So for me, when I hear “climate” concern, I hear the trees and orangutans and tigers and wolves and life I love being slaughtered even faster. The planet and the climate are being destroyed even faster in the name of preventing climate change.”

No worries, they are not too far from the Ark. Sometimes (often) I will imagine what the scene in Kentucky will be like after they announce that the methane howitzer has officially been fired. Tens of thousands white inbred Jesus freaks madly dashing to the ark (just the ones that never got Raptured) hoping to get a seat? cabin? stall? Ken Ham matching ID’s to the passenger list, Ray Comfort passing out Gods ergonomically designed bananas and Kirk Cameron babbling some incoherent bullshit……..

Maybe all the knuckle draggers are firing up their barbecues in Louisville. As things begin to heat up I’m sure brilliant solutions will come to the fore like billboard advertising campaigns, “ Wear White and Stay Cool Louisvoole.” I can’t wait for the first big heat wave, window air conditioners will be going for a thousand dollars each and those fortunate enough to have one will get three minutes of cool before the blackout begins. It will certainly be disenchanting when a fully loaded Ark, loaded with all of the animals from the Cincinnati Zoo, emancipated by the faithful, slides to the bottom of the Ohio river never to be seen again.

ISIS or ISIL has, at its core, Muslims that were radicalized in the West. This latest video of journalist James Foley’s execution is high quality propaganda with flawless english. The terrorist who speaks in this video has a British accent:

ISIS has previous posted pictures of John McCain posing with Syrian Jihadists who are now members of ISIS. John McCain was a major proponent of arming Syria Jihadists, much of whom now fight for ISIS. McCain recently claimed that he could tell which Jihadist are the good guys and which would be potential ISIS/Al-Qaeda members. A claim that was ridiculed in the Arab media.

Once again ISIS is citing John McCain as a key factor in their success.

In an English language recruitment magazine, ISIS stated “the crusader John McCain came to the Senate floor to rant irritably about the victories the Islamic State was achieving in Iraq. He forgot that he himself participated in the invasion of Iraq that led to the blessed events unfolding today by Allah’s bounty and justice.”

“On November 22, 2012, James Wright Foley, a freelance photo journalist, was taken by an organized gang after departing from an internet café in Binesh, Syria. Foley had employed a translator to help him travel across the Syrian-Turkish border. The translator was also taken, but later released.”

No, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.

In recent years, President Obama, his European friends, and even some Middle Eastern allies, have supported “rebel groups” in Libya and Syria. Some received training, financial and military support to overthrow Muammar Gadhafi and battle Bashar al Assad. It’s a strategy that follows the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has been the American and allied approach for decades in deciding whether to support opposition groups and movements.

The problem is that it is completely unreliable — and often far worse than other strategies. Every year there are more cases in which this approach backfires. The most glaring and famous failure was in Afghanistan, where some of the groups taught (and supplied) to fight the Soviet Army later became stridently anti-Western. In that environment, Al Qaeda flourished and established the camps where perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were trained. Yet instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States keeps making them…

…

…These militants are preparing for the day that Western governments catch on. “We do know the U.S. will go after the Islamic State at some stage, and we are ready for it. But they should not underestimate the answer they will get,” said an IS sympathizer in Europe who goes by the name Abu Farouk. He added that the “unconditional support” of the United States toward the government of outgoing premier Nuri al-Maliki, which he says has oppressed Iraqi Sunnis, and America’s “pampering Iran,” which is mainly Shia, made the Islamic State a more attractive alternative for some Sunnis who felt angry about double standards.

“Thanks to the Arab spring and the West fighting all these rulers for us, we had enough time to grow and recruit in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S,” Abu Farouk said. Then he paused for some seconds and smiled. “Actually, we should say, thank you, Mr. President.”

I have had difficulty accessing this site for the last few days,no doubt the problem is this end as I am on slow download speeds until the 25 Aug.
Apneaman,the Sam Harris vivisection of Collins is in ‘The Moral Landscape’,pages 160-174 of the hardback edition.Superb.
James and Apneaman mentioned Dilworth’s ‘Too Smart for our own good’.If anyone is interested,there is a review by George Mobus at Question Everything that makes some good points ,some of which I had noticed as well.The book is not perfect, but still does a good job of explaining the inescapable progress trap we are now in.
Thanks to Mike and everyone else for the essay and useful links.
I got into a slight disagreement at the mahb site .Don’t know why I bothered really,it is too difficult to explain the predicament we are in to those who don’t understand the basics.
The whole sorry Palestine-Israel situation is going to be like a few snacks when the main meal of resource wars and food and water scarcity,etc set in.

I usually read Dr. Mobus’ site “Question Everything” but until recently he’s been busy writing a textbook. In one of his most recent essays he is questioned by RE (Doomstead Diner) regarding what makes humans different from other organisms that are controlled within the ecosystem and he seems short of an answer except to attribute it to lack of sapience or wisdom. Craig Dilworth has considered this, the different rates at which different areas of our brain have advanced, the technological/information enabling areas far outstripping control of the reward/motivational areas so that we evolve technologically to do ourselves in. I think at this point both Dilworth and Mobus consider our situation terminal without some strong voluntary negative feedbacks which seem to go against our behavioral nature and are therefore not to be relied upon to turn the ship. Try and convey to your average business man/woman that they’ll have to voluntarily return to lives with minimal technology, at much smaller numbers with zero growth and see where that gets you. It won’t be voluntary return but rather a free fall with very few parachutes provided.

When life anywhere in the universe gains sufficient intelligence to wield considerable power over it’s environment, unless it develops sufficient wisdom to control that power, it will destroy itself by misusing it’s powers. This should be an obvious law, but those intoxicated by power lose the ability to see and heed this restraint. Such is the madness of hubris. Putting higher centers of the brain in charge of lower centers is a feature of all authentic spiritual systems. Belief in deities and magic is essentially a side show that is irrelevant to the real vital business of these systems of practice and understanding.

The corollary of the above realization is that the only real and lasting solutions to our self-destructive problems is to pursue those methods that develop the necessary wisdom to control our runaway powers. It is difficult for those disgusted with the many versions of false spirituality to see this unavoidable conclusion. No wonder so many who are awakening to our dire predicament fail to see the only direction offering any chance of success – hence they fall into hopelessness and despair. Our chance of using the sole paths beyond our guaranteed doom is slim, but these possibilities are the only ones I can imagine capable delivering us from the trap we have fallen into. Be assured that I am not referring to any of the dead end “spiritualities” around us that are such spectacular failures.

…A severe drought in California—now approaching four years long—has depleted snowpacks, rivers, and lakes, and groundwater use has soared to make up the shortfall. A new report from Stanford University says that nearly 60 percent of the state’s water needs are now met by groundwater, up from 40 percent in years when normal amounts of rain and snow fall.

Relying on groundwater to make up for shrinking surface water supplies comes at a rising price, and this hidden water found in California’s Central Valley aquifers is the focus of what amounts to a new gold rush. Well-drillers are working overtime, and as Brian Clark Howard reported here last week, farmers and homeowners short of water now must wait in line more than a year for their new wells.

In most years, aquifers recharge as rainfall and streamflow seep into unpaved ground. But during drought the water table—the depth at which water is found below the surface—drops as water is pumped from the ground faster than it can recharge. As Howard reported, Central Valley wells that used to strike water at 500 feet deep must now be drilled down 1,000 feet or more, at a cost of more than $300,000 for a single well. And as aquifers are depleted, the land also begins to subside, or sink.

…A 2013 study of 40 aquifers across the United States by the U.S. Geological Survey reports that the rate of groundwater depletion has increased dramatically since 2000, with almost 25 cubic kilometers (six cubic miles) of water per year being pumped from the ground. This compares to about 9.2 cubic kilometers (1.48 cubic miles) average withdrawal per year from 1900 to 2008.

Scarce groundwater supplies also are being used for energy. A recent study from CERES, an organization that advocates sustainable business practices, indicated that competition for water by hydraulic fracturing—a water-intensive drilling process for oil and gas known as “fracking”—already occurs in dry regions of the United States. The February report said that more than half of all fracking wells in the U.S. are being drilled in regions experiencing drought, and that more than one-third of the wells are in regions suffering groundwater depletion.

75% of Queensland,Australia is drought declared,with low chance of rainfall until Dec.
At the current rate of population growth Austalia’s population will increase from 23 million now to 45 million by 2050.All the climate models are showing a large decrease in annual rainfall across Southern Australia,which is the main food producing area,in the coming decades.
Most of the population increase is from immigration,which both main political parties and the business community support.
My reading of the situation is that there will be a population die off before mid century ,possibly much sooner,depending on how the methane situation develops.

Here is another 83 year old asshole the world don’t need. Sweet old uncle Warren. He said it ain’t right that his secretary pays more in taxes then he does. Golly, he’s just a victim of the system like the rest of us. Aww shucks uncle Warren.

“There is a more subtle form, one that is endemic among the white hats of the green movement. They are the ones who tirelessly work from the moral high ground – to change policies, to develop and promote green technology, to encourage sustainability. They resolutely refuse to countenance any thoughts of our predicament being inextricable. Tireless work, even in a lost cause, tends to keep one insulated from the deeper, darker realizations, and lets one keep fighting the good fight. Heroism has always been an intrinsic part of our story: “Quitters never win and winners never quit!”

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]